Oh THANK YOU. Everyone kept talking about how brilliant Too Like The Lightning was and I am sitting here like … there were 300+ pages of rambling about politics

You may have misunderstood, or maybe it’s me.
I loved “…Lightning,” it’s “Seven Surrenders” that I had trouble with. I think because she did almost nothing to bring the reader back into what is a continuation of the same story. I hope she does more to bring us along in the next one.

She also gets nominated at least once, nearly every freaking year. The fact that she doesn’t win every single year should be a clue that maybe there’s no some conspiracy to give teh wimmins all the awards.

Well, no, nobody wins every year. But Lois McMaster Bujold is about as close as you can get. Very few people walk away with more than one or two Best Novel awards, this being the Big One. In fact, if you look at the list, it’s Robert A. Heinlein, Lois McMaster Bujold, Isaac Asimov, Connie Willis, and Vernor Vinge (at 5, 4, 3, 3, 3). Given the percentage of female writers in the early days, this is a pretty good showing, all-told, especially, if you ignore retro Hugos (when it becomes 4, 4, 2, 3, 3).

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It’s sobering to realize that winning a Hugo does not set a talented writer for life, and that she still needed a day job to make ends meet. Hopefully now that all changes and she can pursue writing full time!

I realize that by asking this question I risk being branded a misogynist, or even Godwin’d, but I feel it must be asked…

Did they win because they were women, or because their work was genuinely and honestly better than the work of the men they were in competition with?

If these winners are just “the best females in the game”, and are not genuinely “the best in the game” then all we’ve done is further reinforce the misogynists idea that women always lose against men in a fair competition and must therefore be given a special handicap if we want them to compete at all. In fact, we may be even supporting this claim with evidence if we truly had to give them an unfair advantage in order for them to win.

Lois McMaster Bujold has more “best novel” Hugos than anyone but Heinlein. And one of his was “retro” so they’re tied if you don’t count that one. I think that says pretty clearly that women write equally well.